By the Road

It was the winter that Bernhard Goetz shot the four guys on the subway. The “subway vigilante,” as news stories called him, had just surrendered to police, and everybody had an opinion about what he did and whether he was wrong or right. I was living in northwest Montana, in a house on the side of the Swan Mountains, as far up as you could go before national-forest land. Past the Swan range, behind the house, began the Bob Marshall Wilderness, one of the largest national wilderness areas in the lower forty-eight states. At the foot of the mountains was the valley of the Flathead River. From clear across the valley you could see the light above our garage door.

When I moved to Montana from New York, I’d thought I was going back to some earlier and better version of America, to an Ansel Adams photograph suspended in time. Of course, Montana isn’t like that, nor (as far as I know) is anywhere else. Nowadays, the particular nuttiness of the age surges everywhere instantly, like a magnetic field. Sometimes half the drop-offs at local U-Haul rental places come from California, and whenever upheaval happens there—an earthquake, a riot—the number of refugees seems to go up. A lot of people in Montana aren’t so much living there as they are not living somewhere else.

That winter, the Bernhard Goetz winter, it really snowed. A hard snowfall makes you feel excited and cozy for only about ninety minutes, I found; after that, it becomes irritating, then worrisome, then alarming, and so on, sometimes all the way to panic. Writing, with its limitations at expressing tedium, can’t accurately convey the feeling of watching a steady, hard, unpicturesque, windless snowfall come down for days at a time. Snow piled high on our front deck and on our roof. Sometimes the roof’s snow mass, warmed underneath by the heat it was insulating, would slide down until it met the snow heap on the deck and then freeze there, shutting off the front of the house like a security gate. The driveway to that house was two hundred yards long and included a switchback. I kept it shovelled through the first several snowfalls, but then gave up. Getting it plowed cost more than I could afford, so my wife and I began parking our cars at a wide part of the road about a quarter mile downhill. One of our neighbors, a man named (let’s say) Len Dodd, parked his car there, too. Len Dodd had moved here from Southern California, where he had been a policeman. He had been inspired to move by various long-cultivated dislikes and resentments, combined with a general expectation of coming apocalypse. He talked about these topics in a manner that managed to be tight-lipped and loquacious at the same time. He was short and stocky, with a bristly mustache and narrow eyes, and he often wore a billed cap of a wild, vivid paisley pattern that suggested the scrambled contortions of the thoughts inside.

Len Dodd thought that the subway vigilante was great. He talked about him often, said that Goetz had taught the punks of the world a lesson, hoped that now more people would start carrying concealed weapons on the subway, etc. I was still young enough and game enough to argue. One afternoon, we were standing by our cars for a moment before setting out on the long trudge to our houses, and Len Dodd said that Goetz had had to shoot the guys, because they were threatening him and they were armed. I said that they weren’t “armed”; they had screwdrivers. He said that those weren’t ordinary screwdrivers, they were sharpened screwdrivers. I said—I had just read an article discussing the subject—that the screwdrivers weren’t sharpened. Len Dodd gave me a narrow, in-the-know look, lowered his voice, and said, “That’s not what I heard.”

I looked down the road and up it. Repeated plowings had left the snow berms so high that the tire-packed track in between was like a bobsled run with white walls taller than a person. Snow had fallen the night before, re-burdening the trees all the way to the crest of the Swans, whose topmost spruces and pines stood minutely whitened against the sky like fine-edged crystals of frost on a windowpane. The muffling of new snow added an extra hush to the woods’ usual silence, and the painfully cold air carried no smell but that of the gigantic blankness of the Bob Marshall Wilderness beyond. Not even a deer had ventured up here for months. Len Dodd’s gaze became more intense, as if to convey a hidden truth to me by mental telepathy. “Where did you hear that, Len?” I asked.